


Roll to Kiss the Lizard

by hopeless_eccentric



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Humor, Second Citadel (Penumbra Podcast), allusions to lizard kissin' tuesdays, buddy aurinko hold my hand challenge, juno is rilla and more (number five may surprise you), second citadel is the aurinko crime family's rpg au, the crew of the carte blanche are insufferable rpg players
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25080916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: The Aurinko Crime Family plays an RPG as a team building exercise. Mistakes are made. Lizard kissin' mistakes.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 105





	Roll to Kiss the Lizard

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy. This is largely based off of my own experience with my players being the worst. I love them all and this is dedicated to every single one of you

“Captain A? What’s an RPG?” 

Rita had stolen the words straight from Juno’s mouth, which was currently busied in a napkin. The cheap paper was only making the remains of his lipstick worse, however. 

The family meeting had been called suddenly, as family meetings only were in the case of an emergency or one of Buddy’s brilliant team-building ideas. This, much to Juno’s chagrin, seemed to be the latter. 

Nureyev, who had made no effort to conceal a necklace of mauve smears, straightened up in his seat. 

“If you don’t mind my interjecting,” he interjected. “I have had some experience with the matter before. It’s an acronym for roleplay game, where essentially, a group of players create characters who work as a team to play their way through a story created or moderated by the game master.” 

“Exactly. I think this will be an excellent team building opportunity, as well as a creative outlet. We have quite the stretch between missions, now, and the last thing I want is my crew getting bored. We will play weekly games, which I will moderate. In the meantime—“ Buddy broke off to slide a stack of paper towards the crew. “Character sheets.” 

Juno groaned. “Seriously? And we’re supposed to just unwind by what—slaying dragons?” 

“Juno, if you think I would subject you to something as overdone as dragon slaying, you clearly have not been paying attention,” Buddy said. 

Mind on the same planet, and more specifically, the same theme park, as Juno, Rita gave his arm a little squeeze. Juno returned a soft smile that was undercut by the fact it was smeared with purple. 

“I think it’ll be fun, Miss Buddy!” Rita insisted. “She’s right, Mistah Steel. You don’t need dragon slaying to have a good story. Like in this one stream I watched where the princess actually became friends with the dragon, and—“ 

She was broken off by the sound of Jet setting down his book for the first time all meeting. 

“How involved must one be in this game?” He asked. 

“As involved as you want to be,” Buddy returned. Juno could have sworn he saw Vespa silently thank God. 

“Ah. I will take that into account when creating my character,” Jet said. He reached for a pencil and sheet of paper across the table, and as if a spell had been broken, the remainder of the table followed suit. 

“Bud,” Vespa began once the table had become loud enough with scattered conversations to warrant a private word of her own. “I love you, and I wanna do what makes you happy, but I really don’t think this is up my alley.” 

“You’d be surprised, my darling,” Buddy replied, opening a book designed to resemble an ancient Earthen tome. 

“Knights in shining armor just really aren’t my…” 

Vespa trailed off as Buddy spun the book around, nail resting atop a section on nonhuman races. “If you find yourself stuck, do a little reading. In my—albeit limited—experience with the subject, I have found that often helps.”

Rita was already halfway through a paragraph of backstory when Juno had tapped his pencil on his page enough times to leave a small cloud of marks next to the line that read “name.” 

“Ransom, how the hell do you come up with all those aliases?” He laughed incredulously, shaking his head at the page. Juno squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them, as if a name might magically appear in the meantime. 

“Go with what feels right, Juno,” Nureyev advised. “If you get stuck, pick a flower.” 

Juno bit his lip at the page, then turned back to Nureyev. 

“How do you feel about Amaryllises?” 

After mere minutes of his pencil traveling between his page and his temple, Jet set it down, leaned back in his chair, and cracked open his book once more. 

“Mistah Jet,” Rita began, glancing up from the margins into which her character’s backstory had wandered. “You don’t have much there on your page.” 

Jet slid his bookmark back into place and looked up. 

“There is little in life I desire more than a simple existence,” he began, eyes falling back to his page. “However, to be simple, unburdened, and good is a difficult life to realize. As such, I have put such an existence on paper.” 

“Wow, that was beautiful, Mistah Jet.” 

“And I also wish to continue using my free time to read my book,” he added. 

“What’s it about?” 

Jet smiled, as if a part of him had been waiting for the question to be asked all evening. 

“The history of female leadership on Earth and surrounding planets. It is a rather fascinating read, and quite enlightening,” Jet began, Rita’s pencil falling onto her page as she listened. 

On her other side, Juno turned to Nureyev, who was in the process of erasing and rewriting his notes on character for the third time. 

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” he mused. 

“Too many things to count, I’m afraid,” Nureyev returned between gritted teeth as he fought the eraser. Juno laid a hand on his arm, which in turn, ceased its brutal crusade against the paper. 

“Hey,” Juno began. The single word seemed to coax him into a deep breath. “You don’t have to have this knight guy perfect on your first draft. We’ve got a week. You can workshop accents on me like you did with the Outer Rim heist and I won’t even complain this time.” 

Nureyev laughed, and Juno’s face managed to soften further. 

“Don’t lie to me, Juno. Of course you’re going to complain,” Nureyev teased.

“Okay, but only a little.” 

“Oh, barf,” Vespa groaned, burying her face in the manual. She paused there for such a long moment Juno was unsure if she would ever rise again. When she did, her mouth twitched oddly, as if taking great pains to hold back a grin. “Ransom, you said your guy’s a knight?” 

“Yes, as far as I’ve drafted.” 

“How does he feel about giant lizards?” 

“Somewhere between neutral and bad, I’m assuming,” Nureyev returned, eyebrow raised. “Why?”

Vespa’s response was a wave and a nod in place of thanks, returning to her protective hunch over the page on which she crossed out a word and scribbled something in its place. 

. . . 

“This is Quanyii. They’re usually a BEAUTIFUL lady, though sometimes they’re a beautiful man, it really just depends, but they’re always called Quanyii. It helps a lot that Quanyii’s a witch, so she can make herself look like whatever she wants,” Rita explained, sitting down with as much gusto as she’d stood up when beginning her spiel. 

A week full of a few more workshopped accents than Juno ever expected to be able to bear had brought them back to the table for a family meeting. 

Buddy piled files both digital and physical at the end of the table, and seemed to be packing just as much reading material as heat. In a similar vein, Jet’s head remained bent towards his lap, in which a book on female revolutionaries in the twenty third century lay. 

“Thank you for volunteering to go first, Rita,” Buddy smiled. “Who’s next?” 

Juno sighed and raised a hand before Rita could elbow Jet. He looked like he had just gotten to a good spot. 

“So...uh…” Juno checked his page for the name he had spent far too many minutes on to forget. “This is Amaryllis. Rilla, for short. She’s a doctor who lives in the forest outside the Citadel. Her fiancé is a knight, so even though they don’t see each other often, they visit a lot. So...yeah.”

Nureyev gave his hand a squeeze as Juno set down the page. 

“Rilla’s fiancé is Sir Damien, a skilled archer and devout knight of the Second Citadel with a penchant for both monster slaying and poetry,” Nureyev began when nobody offered to go next. “He often waxes poetic in the guise of prayer to his patron saint, or in casual conversation to anyone willing to listen.” 

Juno snorted at the memory of being on the receiving end of what he could have only assumed was a rehearsed breakdown, just in case anything were to happen to his darling Rilla. 

“I will share my character,” Jet said, returning his bookmark to its page. Juno could only assume he’d finished a chapter. “He is Sir Angelo the Strong. He is good of heart and respects women. That is all.” 

Juno wasn’t sure how many more words he’d expected out of the Big Guy, though his train of thought was derailed when Vespa cleared her throat and raised her paper for a better look at it. 

“My character’s Lord Arum. He’s a giant lizard monster with four arms. He likes knives and he hates humans,” she announced, words sounding a bit rehearsed. Buddy gave her a little smile as she set the page back down. 

“I feel I have made you all wait long enough, what with the review of rules, game mechanics, and character introductions,” Buddy began, reaching for the first of many pages beside her. It appeared to be some form of script. “It seems only right that we now begin.” 

. . . 

About an hour into the game, Juno was forced to admit he was having a surprisingly good time. Mostly because Nureyev seemed to be having the time of his life. Later, he’d find it in him to tease Nureyev mercilessly, but for the moment, the look of feigned injustice at the mere concept of a giant lizard breaking into the castle during such an important religious festival was making his chest feel stupidly warm. 

“I attack the fiend,” Nureyev announced, so resolute Juno didn’t know whether to laugh or melt on the spot. 

Buddy raised an eyebrow. “If I’m remembering correctly, Ransom, your leg is broken in eight pieces.”

“Five,” Nureyev interjected. “And three of them are almost healed.”

Buddy sighed, shaking her head as she gestured for him to roll. 

“Seventeen,” he grinned. 

“Sir Damien’s initial attack against the lizard Lord Arum is successful, and despite his injury, he manages to remain unscathed in the process,” Buddy began, eyes flitting between her crew and her notes. “He slices one of Arum’s arms, and now has the lizard pinned.” 

Nureyev’s face faltered. “It was an unfair duel. I let the monster live.” 

“You WHAT?” Vespa spat from across the table, elbow landing beside her dice as she pushed herself to standing. “You coward! How was that an unfair duel?” 

“Well, you see, I had a knife in fifty percent of my arms, while you were armed in only twenty five percent of yours. You did this in the hopes of a fair duel, but it seems I may have accidentally stacked the deck in my favor.” 

“Accidentally? Like hell that was an accident,” Vespa shot back. 

“Are you upset that he’s not killing you?” Buddy asked. 

“I’m just a little pissed that he doesn’t have the balls to spare my dignity,” Vespa began, pausing for a long moment as she wracked her brain for some kind of retaliation. “I roll to seduce the puny knight.” 

Juno choked on his drink. 

“What?” He gasped, wiping coffee from his nose. 

“What about my...“ Nureyev began, words falling away as the die landed with a finite click. 

Twenty. 

Buddy swallowed down an emotion she couldn’t have named if she wanted to and rifled through her notes. She knew there was no precedent in there for this kind of thing. However, it gave her a few moments longer to force words to come to her mouth. 

“Sir Damien bandages Lord Arum with one of the queen’s headscarves, and for a moment, is convinced he sees something human in Arum’s violet eyes. Arum says perhaps there is something monstrous in Damien’s eyes. His words will ward off Damien’s sleep for days.” 

A murmur from behind Nureyev’s hands broke the silence. 

“I’m assuming we should duel later to save both our dignities.”

Vespa’s response was a strangled noise of affirmation. Nureyev raised his head to see her head in her hands as well. 

“It’s okay, Mistah Ransom, Miss Vespa,” Rita began. “I’m sure people would kiss giant lizard men all the time if they existed.” 

“In my defense, I didn’t think it would work,” Vespa bemoaned. 

“None of us mean what we say in the passion of combat,” Nureyev managed, though the tone of his next words made him sound like he’d rather pull his own teeth out than say them. “I forgive you.” 

“Hey, congrats to the happy couple and all, but what about his fiancée?” Juno piped up, glancing between his two very red crew mates as if either of them would be capable of answering. 

Jet saved them all the burden of speaking by setting down his book. 

“As Vespa previously mentioned in Lord Arum’s introduction, he has four arms, and is therefore capable of holding many hands at once,” he offered. 

Juno groaned. Nureyev’s face fell back into his hands. 

This was going to be a long campaign.

**Author's Note:**

> First off, sorry. Secondly, thank you so much for reading!! Make sure to smash that kudos button or leave a comment below!! 
> 
> My tumblr is @hopeless-eccentric if you want to come yell at me for this


End file.
